14 DAY TRIAL // I will start this week with another graphics viewer that I noticed to have some attention from Softpedia's users. There's no need to say what a good image viewer must do, since you all must know about IrfanView or ACDSee, so I'll go straight to the point.
Today's target is called PolyView and reached version 4.30 so far. I got it as a shareware version that came to me as a 3.24MB installation kit, very easy to download and set up.
Unfortunately for many good graphics editors and image viewers that I've seen lately, too many in my opinion, the producers hurry to add a lot of features, but leave the interface behind. PolyView is easy enough to use, but its interface looks outdated, although it has customizable toolbars that can help you set up your tools the way you want. What we have to do now is discover some of the program's best features before drawing the conclusions, and I am going to start as usual, with the File menu.
First thing that I am concerned about an image viewer or editor is the compatibility problem. To be more specific, I am talking about the file types that can be opened and the ones that can be saved using the program in question.
When talking about PolyView's file support, things look great. This program can open most of the popular graphics image formats, including BMP, FlashPix, GIF, JPEG, JPEG 2000, PCX, Photo-CD, PNG, SGI, TARGA, TIFF, and many others, while your work can be exported into most of the file formats above, since there are only few read-only file types here, such as FlashPix or Photo-CD.
PolyView provides excellent file printing support, having a lot of tools for helping you with this. The Print Composer allows you to organize your images in standard sizes on the printed page in order to obtain best use of the available printing area and avoid wasting the paper. There's much more about printing than this, but I leave the rest of it for you and I move on.
An intriguing feature of this program lets you create sound playlists. The interesting part is that you can't use it as a media player, so why bother? The reason is beyond my reach now, but I see no real problem with this, since a tool like this can be useful sometimes and it's good to have, even though the program that has it is an image viewer.
When it comes to other goodies, PolyView lets you create animated GIFs, HTML galleries, perform batch operations and apply basic image effects and adjustments. The Thumbnail Explorer allows you to generate thumbnails of your pictures and then explore them into a Windows Explorer like interface.
When you open the Options area, the real power of this program is revealed. It may not be an eye candy or the best image viewer in the wild, but it's extremely customizable and has a lot of settings available. These being said, I'm going to the conclusions now.
The Good
PolyView is easy to use, highly customizable and supports a wide range of file types. It supports batch operations, HTML galleries generation and more, while the documentation is comprehensive and helpful.
The Bad
This application is not free, but the price you have to pay for it shouldn't be high, if there weren't so many excellent free programs from this family, like IrfanView or XnView. Anyway, PolyView has some features of its own that can make it attractive to people who may need them. The interface is the last bad thing that I have to point out here, and I'd like to see an improvement here in the future, after all, people pay money for this!
The Truth
As usual, my advice is to try this program. It's a small download, free to test for 30 days and a pleasure to work with, so don't wait any longer, grab PolyView now!
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
